The purpose of this newsletter is to inform the collaboration of recent and upcoming changes in computing. We’re in the middle of an ‘exciting’ time for computing as we’re constantly adapting to new operating systems and authentication methods. This means there are frequent changes that affect all DUNE users. We offer tutorials, the wiki, and a FAQ page, but those move more slowly so we’re trying this newsletter as a way to bridge the gap between permanent documentation and real-time announcements.
You can find newsletters at https://wiki.dunescience.org/wiki/Computing_Newsletters.
If you want computing news and have questions, remember to join the DUNE Slack and the #computing-announcements and #computing-questions channels. (And if you know an answer, please help out.)
Slack: #computing-questions, #computing-announcements, #computing-basics-training
The Joint DUNE AI/ML and CS&C Workshop, will be held at Rice University on March 10–12, 2026. The primary objective of this workshop is to conduct an in-depth discussion on how CS&C can better meet the needs of AI/ML users within DUNE. The current agenda can be found at https://indico.fnal.gov/event/72868/timetable/#all. Please let us know if you have any questions. Registration closes on Feb 28, 2026.
Mark your calendars for May 11–15, 2026, for the NPC DUNE Data Analysis School (NPC-DDAS) at Fermilab. The school will provide focused, practical training in DUNE analysis tools and workflows. Applications will open soon; some financial support will be available for selected participants. More info: https://npc.fnal.gov/npc-data-analysis-school/
There has been a lot of work on spack builds for DUNE software for use on AL9. Please join the #spack channel in Slack for frequent updates.
From V. Hewes (2/16/2026) : the spack environments on CVMFS were just updated – there was a minor update to dune-sw-10_11_01d00-justin-01_06_00-prototype (dune-prototype) reflecting changes in the upstream FNAL environment, and there is also a new phlex-0_1_0-prototype environment, which is symlinked as dune-phlex-prototype for convenience. please let me know if you run into any issues, either with the updated dunesw environment or the new phlex environment!
There is now a #phlex slack channel as well.
source /cvmfs/dune.opensciencegrid.org/spack/setup-env.sh
echo "Activate dune-prototype"
spack env activate dune-sw-10_11_01d00-justin-01_06_00-prototype
source /cvmfs/dune.opensciencegrid.org/spack/setup-env.sh
echo "Activate dune-phlex-prototype"
spack env activate dune-phlex-prototype
InCommon certificate authority change Most host certificates in the United States institutions are currently issued by InCommon. Recent requirements from the Internet CA/Browser forum will no longer allow these certificates to be used as clients to access other web servers. We will not be able to get any new certs with client capacity after March 31, 2026, although our existing ones will be usable until they expire. As a result we will be reaching out to 13 compute sites and several storage elements which still only take certificates and make sure they can all accept tokens. We will also complete the transition of the internals of the DUNE Rucio server, several machines in the DUNE data ingest pipeline, and the GlideinWMS frontend to no longer rely on the InCommon certificates as clients, with the goal of finishing this work by March 2026.
Users can currently run jobs with a fair-share priority. But we often find several people performing similar tasks at large scale and then storing the results, uncataloged, in personal areas. To preserve resources we plan to move to a tiered priority system where people acting on behalf of physics groups or the production group will have higher priority than individuals. Individuals can still submit their own jobs but will find they run faster if they collaborate within their physics groups. See Andrew McNab’s talk for a brief explanation. Implementation will occur over the next few months.
The Production Group makes official datasets. The Rice group has created a website for finding them. There are also command line tools for exploring further. See the tutorial for details or go straight to the website to find your samples.
A reminder that the Fermilab compute nodes and disk servers undergo monthly maintenance on the 3rd Wednesday of each month. Systems are partially unavailable for 3-6 hours, which leads to things not working.
Just a reminder that running larsoft still requires Scientific Linux 7 in a container. You can find sample scripts for setting up your container here.
Tokens are the new way to authenticate to access dCache disk, our data catalogs (rucio) and submit batch jobs (justin and jobsub). On SL7, follow these instructions. The recent prototype spack environments (above) can make tokens using justin get-token. We suggest you upgrade to those.
If you just want to access files via root or xrdcp and don’t need rucio or justin you can use this method to get an interactive token.
htgettoken -i dune --vaultserver htvaultprod.fnal.gov -r interactive
export BEARER_TOKEN_FILE=/run/user/`id -u`/bt_u`id -u`
export X509_CERT_DIR=/cvmfs/oasis.opensciencegrid.org/mis/certificates
Want to read HDF5 files with LArSoft - for now you need to load a special library on the same line as your lar command.
LD_PRELOAD=$XROOTD_LIB/libXrdPosixPreload.so lar -c standard_reco_protodunehd_keepup.fcl $DATA -n 1